You probably saw a few days ago in the news that all of British Airways fleet of planes was grounded worldwide because of a “glitch” in their IT system. It’s rumoured that this will cost the company over $100 million in compensation to passengers and their share price has already lost $170 million in value. What’s troubling is that they still don’t know what caused the catastrophic outage. Industry insiders, however, are saying the likely cause is outdated infrastructure, for example: “We were leading the communications curve back 20 years ago, and the problem is that that now means that much of our infrastructure is hanging off a 25-year-old backbone. Some data centres are reaching the end of their life. And how do you refurbish that when you can’t turn it off?” Read more about this here.

An interesting article in Wired puts forward the notion that coding rather than being a glamorous profession for intellectuals is actually the new “blue collar’ job, equivalent to a skilled car factory job in the 1970s. It’s worth a read.

This week’s final public Gibbons lecture, organised by the Dept. of Computer Science at The University of Auckland will take place this Thursday evening. The lecture titled The Ethics of AI will be given by Associate Professor Watson, Department of Computer Science, University of Auckland. Information about the lecture, the venue and times can be found here. If you cannot attend in person the lecture will be live streamed and will be available online afterwards from the link above.

This week’s free public Gibbons lectures, organised by the Dept. of Computer Science at The University of Auckland will take place this Thursday evening. The lecture titled Deep learning – what’s missing? will be given by Associate Professor Marcus Frean, School of Engineering and Computer Science, Victoria University of Wellington. Information about the lecture, the venue and times can be found here. If you cannot attend in person the lecture will be live streamed and will be available online afterwards.

The first of this year’s free public Gibbons lectures, organised by the Dept. of Computer Science at The University of Auckland will take place this Thursday evening. The first lecture titled AI: from Aristotle to deep learning machines will be given by Professor Nikola Kasabov, Director of the KEDRI Research Institute, Auckland University of Technology. Information about the lecture, the venue and times can be found here. If you cannot attend in person the lecture will be live streamed and will be available online afterwards.